They Killed Sister Dorothy

I've never experienced a Brazilian courtroom and after seeing this, I pray that I never do. On the evidence presented here, trials are a cross between soap opera and pantomime - a mix of exuberant, impassioned speeches, naked perjury and bureaucratic chaos. And there seems to be no such word as "objection".

Sister Dorothy Stang was a 67-year-old Catholic nun from Ohio who'd spent 30 years in the northern Brazilian state of Para, campaigning against ranchers and loggers and for sustainable community projects. Locals called her "the angel of the Amazon". She was shot in cold blood in 2005 while walking down the road, and her killers claimed her death was the spur-of-the-moment result of some kind of altercation. Nobody believed it, of course. At the time, the fight between Stang's community and the ranchers and loggers over a crucial patch of virgin forest had reached breaking point. The trail of evidence was simple to follow, but bringing anyone to justice is another matter. There had been more than 800 murders over such land disputes in Para in the past 30 years, and only one imprisonment.

Beyond just nailing the killers, Dorothy's community seek to nail the big guys behind them, and the higher up the chain they get, the more outlandish and gripping the trial scenes become. Not only do the murderers and middle-men repeatedly change their stories as they are "got to", and make brazenly absurd claims - that Sister Dorothy was arming locals, that she was an agent of the US Government, that the FBI has been involved in the investigation. The last claim even turns out to be true. The film-makers gain incredible access to the defence team, who present themselves as cartoon villains, drinking, smoking and cackling as they plot their strategy. From a personal story, it ends up as a stark illustration of corruption and the fight against it.